When displaying an image or a video there is a minimum amount of bits needed to be able to display the image/video without a degradation in quality. Since an image/video is able to have varying amounts of detail, if equal amounts of bits are given to the low detail blocks of the image as the high detail blocks, it is possible that bit resources will be wasted on the low detail blocks leaving the bit resources lacking for the high detail blocks which will cause poor image quality.
Previous methods have encoded wavelet coefficients bitplane by bitplane, until a certain target bitplane is reached. However, this process is computationally complex.